Cambridge

By Susanna Kaysen

Susanna Kaysen has built a career straddling the memoir-fiction divide. Before the accolades and commercial success of her 1993 memoir, "Girl, Interrupted," she mined her life for two spare but elegant novels. Now, after another memoir, she's crossed over again with what her publisher calls a "novel-from-life" that mashes up the good and the bad of both genres.

"Cambridge" is named for the city of her youth, but a more apt title would have been "Harvard Square, Interrupted." Young Susanna, our fictionalized protagonist, is very much a product of the city's most entitled enclave. She's the daughter of an academic and a frustrated pianist, and their lives are filled with multicultural and artistic experiences.

Living in such a rarefied environment can be a plus. For a child, however, this lifestyle and, one assumes, her parents' attempts to educate Susanna and her younger sister, can have a downside. Quite content at home, Susanna is continually uprooted, starting in the second grade when the family goes for extended stays in England, Italy and Greece.

While Susanna decries "the impotence of being a child," which gives her no say in these familial sojourns, they do not make for what would usually be described as hardship. What can do that, and sometimes does in this uneven work, is the level of detail that captures that childhood helplessness, as well as an 8-year-old's fear of such new things as a strange toilet.

Kaysen's impressions, writing as a child, can be raw and vivid. Take her tomboy outrage at her mother's choice of sundresses, for example: "One of them was pink!" There's an immediacy in this reaction, a sense of indignation that perfectly conjures the insulted, if single-minded, girl.

That headstrong child faces a greater challenge as puberty looms and her own body turns traitor. Faced with the emergence of "disconcerting lumps" that "might be breasts," she's in crisis, desperately trying to hold onto a childhood that she has been losing since the novel's start.

It's an interesting problem, one that acts as a theme throughout. "Cats and children are conservative," she notes on the very first page. It has also consistently set her apart from her family, underscoring the odd tension in her parents' marriage that might have made a more interesting subject for a book.

"It was as if they were the children," she says of her parents, "excited by all the new things, and I was the adult, anxious and stuck in my ways."

Such observations are gold, the best part of the book. They are also, sadly, interrupted by lesser writing. Too often Kaysen the author steps out of character, swinging from her childhood protagonist into an adult voice.

On the flip side, Kaysen too often holds herself to memoir's stringent standards of accuracy when she could be using the freedom of fiction to fill in the gaps.

The worst failing, however, lies at the base of this book. Cambridge, the lost paradise, barely exists here. Yes, Kaysen tells us about the "three-story wooden Victorian house with the square backyard." But the city? It's generic: the setting for summer bike rides and family dinners that, really, could have happened anywhere. At least, in any college town where a young girl's indulgent parents tried to bring the world to her.